


Between the Dawn and Dark of Night

by ScriveSpinster



Category: Sunless Skies
Genre: Alternate Ending, F/M, Ficlet, Freedom, more sweet than bitter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-28
Updated: 2019-04-28
Packaged: 2020-02-09 10:02:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18635914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScriveSpinster/pseuds/ScriveSpinster
Summary: The Captain returns to the Reach to visit an old acquaintance and talk over choices made and paths not taken.





	Between the Dawn and Dark of Night

**Author's Note:**

> There is a thing that is implied/confirmed when your captain starts to hit high levels of nightmares. This snippet relies on it.

The night is dark, in the little clearing where the Captain makes landfall, and sweet with the scent of blossoms and wild grasses. She leaves her crew behind with the locomotive – there’s no danger to them, in this place, and none to her – and sets out alone, along a way she needs no light to see. The Repentant Devil keeps his home here, on this small planetoid surrounded by chorister hives and fungal thickets. There are gardens, well-tended, and statues of brass and stone leading up to a house that seems more library than anything else. She walks along a hexagon-tiled path to the veranda where he sits, smoking a long-stemmed pipe and looking up into the deep skies.

“The traveler returns,” he says, smiling like he’s told a joke known only to himself. “I had wondered what your choice would be.”

“So had I,” she says. She sits beside him, wraps her arms around her knees and lets it all wash over her: the night, the company, the paths and winds that brought her here. The ones who used to command her hadn’t imagined there could _be_ a choice, but the problem with sending someone to learn is that sometimes they do. And so she did, and so she chose: the freedom of the Reach, and her locomotive, and a life small enough to slip through the gaps of the Chain and be forgotten.

Far away, the stars still hold their glittering courts, play their games and fight their wars and order the universe to their liking, but here, wilderness abides. Life finds its own order in the trails of bioluminescent insects and drifting spores, and in the darkness that fills the space between. This is what she’s fought for – this darkness, this light, this verdant silence; no perfect world, but the red-toothed democracy of nature unbound.

As for her companion, he doesn’t press for answers. The years have taught him patience, and so they sit side by side, shoulder to shoulder, comfortable in the semblance of something neither of them can lay claim to. She takes a flask from her pocket and drinks: brandy, not the toxic fungal sort he has a taste for but the kind they make from apples in Avon. She offers it anyway, and he takes it; his fingers radiate heat as they brush hers, and she thinks of pulling him down, catching him in a kiss.

Instead, she says, “I’m curious what you would have chosen, if...”

“If I’d been offered one more chance to serve in heaven?”

“No,” she says. “Not to serve. You never expected that, when you thought yourself something greater than me.”

He turns to her, as careful in motion as he had been relaxed in stillness; something unreadable flickers beneath the surface of his gaze.

“You think I would have refused,” he says. “I might have. I might even have offered my allegiance in truth. But my ethics have always been of a more pragmatic bent than yours.”

And yes, he’d told her, once, how he’d served the stars, and why. That sits uneasy – the thought of what she had been once, and what she might yet be – but she’s willing to let it be a problem for another day. For now, she’s content with the taste of apples, sweet and strong and light on her tongue, and with the certainty that the only person who controls what she becomes is herself.

 _A captain,_ she thinks. Only that and nothing more. Smuggler and wayfinder, conductor on the New Street Line. And he a gardener. The universe is full of strange endings to strange stories – and just as full of things that look like endings, and aren’t. Which of the two this is, it’s hard to say, but there’s an offer to be made, before she lets the silence grow comfortable again.

“There’s still a place for you among my crew,” she tells him, “if you ever grow bored with roses.”

“Ask me again in a century or two,” he says, and offers her a tilted smile, amusement shot through with something quieter and far more dangerous; to her own surprise, she takes his hand and smiles back. 

“Deal.”

**Author's Note:**

> Incidentally, in case anyone is wondering, I know perfectly well that the Traveler Returning refers to someone entirely different. The Devil just thinks he’s being clever.


End file.
